Lecture: "A Systems-and-Control viewpoint on Biology and Epidemiology"

Professor Giulia Giordano is an Outstanding Junior Fellow at The Institute of Advanced Studies for the academic year ​2024/2025 .

Abstract

The talk focuses on systems-and-control approaches to unravel the key features of systems in biology, ecology and epidemiology. We first consider biochemical reaction networks, and approaches to capture the system structure and enable the parameter-free assessment of important properties, such as the stability of equilibria and the sign of steady-state input-output influences, thus allowing structural model falsification and structural comparison of alternative mechanisms proposed to explain the same phenomenon. We discuss how structural results can be leveraged to gain parameter-free insight into physiological phenomena and into the onset of diseases, as well as to design artificial circuits in synthetic biology that are guaranteed to exhibit the desired behavior in spite of parameter variations and environmental fluctuations. Then, we consider epidemiological systems describing the spread of infectious diseases within a population, along with control approaches to cope with uncertain parameter values and optimally curb the contagion.